Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: Toussaint L’Ouverture, Op. 46 - Ballade Op. 4 - Suites from “24 Negro Melodies”

With this collection of previously unrecorded pieces by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, violinist Curtis Stewart and the National Philharmonic Orchestra make a substantial contribution to the ongoing revival of music by the pioneering British Black composer, born in August 1875. Coleridge-Taylor was treated like visiting royalty during his tours to the US during the early 1900s. He was received by President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House, and his cantata, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, rivalled Handel’s Messiah in popularity both in the UK and America. There was a Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society in Washington, DC, and a public school in Baltimore named after him. The National Philharmonic, based just outside Washington and conducted by Michael Repper, builds on recent Coleridge-Taylor scholarship for this album. It includes two sets of arrangements from Coleridge-Taylor’s 24 Negro Melodies, solo piano works based on spirituals and songs mainly from Africa and the Americas. “He was thinking worldwide,” Stewart tells Apple Music Classical, referring to the various songs from East Africa, West Africa and the Americas. “To try and map this culture around the world, to show the spread of that direct diaspora, it’s painful and deep. He was very much ahead of his time.” Stewart contributes his own “re-imaginings” of three of the 24 Negro Melodies, incorporating blues improvisations, hip-hop-inflected stomp-claps and call-and-response vocalisations from the orchestra. Stewart honed his arrangement in live performances, particularly in “Deep River” during which the audience would sometimes spontaneously join in on the responses. “There is an element of fantasy that’s going on in Coleridge-Taylor’s arrangements. He’s finding his Victorian-era, heavily ornamented, richly harmonic language in this music.” In his new arrangements, Stewart “wanted to maintain this sense that we’re having the same musical conversation, even if we’re speaking different languages”. Coleridge-Taylor’s own orchestral arrangements of five of the 24 Negro Melodies are also feature here, drawn from manuscripts held in the British Library and prepared by the scholars Lionel Harrison and the late Patrick Meadows. “I love the orchestrations,” says Stewart. “He uses the orchestration quite musically to build up the folk songs and draw them back. So, all the players have to do is just play.” Stewart also appears on the early Ballade in D Minor for Violin and Orchestra, a lusciously rhapsodic work that highlights Coleridge-Taylor’s affinity for the violin. “It’s such a graceful piece,” says Stewart, “but you can also see that he’s going back and forth from various feelings and emotions very quickly, and he can be very dark and sombre. And then it makes a quick transition to a bright athletic writing.” The album opens with Toussaint L’Ouverture, a musical portrait of the enslaved Creole man who became a military general and led the liberation of Haiti. The stately piece echoes the symphonic poems of Dvořák, one of Coleridge-Taylor’s chief influences. One can only guess how Coleridge-Taylor’s career might have progressed had he not died at the age of 37—barely older than Mozart at the time of his premature death. But Repper, Stewart and colleagues have managed not only to unearth some real treasures, but make them widely available, sharing their performance materials freely online. “If somebody were to hear this and think they could do a better version of it, or create their own thing and just spread that word,” says Stewart, “I think that would be the real honour.”